Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Has anyone ever complimented you on how
well you speak your native language? I don’t mean praise for those
of us who may be professional speakers, I mean praise for ordinary
speakers like you and me. It has happened to me, about Portuguese,
from fellow Portuguese and in Portugal, on the grounds that I don’t
look very Portuguese (apparently). Before I decided that such
episodes were actually quite funny, I had to overcome the unsettling
sensation that I had just been insulted by being complimented.

Certain features of speech seem indeed
to be expected from certain facial and other physical features
(apparently), in the same sense that you wouldn’t expect your pet
dog to bray. This is all fine: we all have our stereotypes and
associated expectations to live and judge by, which we actually
develop in early childhood.
But how do we, adults, deal with human beings whose looks and speech
don’t match our expectations? We could revise our adult
expectations
in adult ways, of course, since facts are facts and stereotypes are
fiction. More often than not, however, we attempt to make new facts
fit old expectations, so we can go on entertaining these. I never understood why it seems so much easier to hang on to useless
theories (of which expectations are a subset)
which fail to explain observed facts, than to reject flawed theories,
in the face of facts which contradict them.

Expectations come complete with labels,
the problem being that expected labels cannot obviously account for
unexpected facts. Not just labels about looks and speech, either. I
remember, for example, a lengthy discussion in the major daily
newspaper in one of the places I’ve lived, seriously asking (and
seriously getting serious feedback on) whether women over 50 years of
age should wear jeans. And I’m just rereading Notre-Dame de Paris, where the destitute Gringoire’s fleeting moment of
solace on a day of complete debacle, personified by a dancing and
singing young beauty whom he’s persuaded must be a fairy, a
goddess, a nymph, is shattered by a sudden realisation: “Hé
non! dit-il, c’est une bohémienne.” And Victor Hugo, canny
observer of human nature that he was, adds: “Toute illusion
avait disparu.” Other
mystifying beingslikewise cease to mystify once we
choose to identify them by means of familiar labels: we can now deal
with the labels, and stop bothering about the beings. Just look at the
labels that go on being pasted onto multilinguals, as I discuss in my
book Multilinguals are ...?

On
several occasions, in my teens, revealing my nationality caused
Gringoire-like disillusion among international (ex-)friends, who up
to then had deemed me quite worthy of their polite company. I’m
sure they had their reasons, but my point is that my answers to their
questions about where I was from were as straightforward as their
dismissal of me upon hearing them: I “was” indeed “from”
Portugal, at the time, though I’ve come to doubt whether this place
I am from provides the
best definition of who I am,
period. Or why it should.

Place
labels rank high in cataloguing practices: “where we
have them” enables
retrieval of appropriate decisions about how to relate to them,
on the strength of their where.
In the face (literally) of people who were, say, born in X from
parents born elsewhere, grew up in W, had children in Y and T, then
moved to R and Z and, to top it all, speak our language (among
others) as well as we do, the same question crops up: “Where
are you from?”, with stress on Where
and a high-rising tone of bafflement which attempts to secure the
“fact” that people must belong somewhere, in the same sense that
your pet dog belongs to you.

A
single somewhere, that
is, because answers revealing pluralities, like “I come from
Portugal and Sweden”, don’t seem to pass muster either. The
“Wait...” bit in
the question usually denotes glitches in processing multi-factual answers to mono-minded questions.
Similar questions
require simple, i.e. single(minded) answers to it: there must be an
X, such that X stands for the place where your biological mother
happened to go into labour, which then means that you belong
to X. As if you belonged to places – or rather, as if places owned
people. You can read a sample of other intriguing questions asked of
multilinguals and multiculturals (and also a sample of my production
when I’m in sarcastic mode) in this piece, ‘The bilemma in the bilingual brain’,
published in Speculative Grammarian, “the
premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field
of satirical linguistics”.

I’ll have more to say about multilingual “roots” some other day but, next time, I’d like to turn to the
effects that classificatory labels can have on children’s academic
and overall development.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

“Ghetto” is one of those words we
probably wouldn’t wish to have tagged on to us and those we hang
around with. The meaning of the word denotes shared group behaviours
which are perceived to differ from those behaviours shared by other
groups, but connotes judgements of value = ‘not good’. Ghetto
behaviour is also generally perceived to be minority behaviour – or
it wouldn’t be deemed worthy of a special label. Like elite
behaviour? Elites are also perceived as special minorities, the
difference being that the word “elite” usually connotes
judgements of value = ‘good’.

Judgements about “minority”
behaviour don’t pass historical or geographical scrutiny – just
look at judgements about multilingualism.
What was yesterday and/or here the hallmark of a ghetto becomes
mainstream hip today and/or elsewhere. The BBC recently reported on
the current comeback of lederhosen and dirndl dresses in Austria, which I
found all the more interesting because I didn’t know dirndl dress
had ever been out, in the country: in the town just outside Vienna
where my family lived, dirndl was what we saw all around us for
shopping, working, visiting friends and eating out. Elite behaviours,
in turn, become stigmatised, not least linguistic ones: see for
example the discussion about the (no longer so) prestigious RP accent
(Received Pronunciation) in these two articles, both dealing with
choices of accents for purposes of language teaching, and both
playing with the acronyms RP and RIP in their titles,
one by Paul Tench
and the other by Ronald Macaulay.

We seem nevertheless happy to stick to
our habits of portraying linguistic uses as belonging to linguistic
ghettos (or elites), by keeping the respective judgemental
connotations of these words without having to use the words. In
monolingual settings, we can equate our local mainstream linguistic
standard
with unqualified standards of language, and thereby feel entitled to
issue judgements about outsiders to those standards. One
of my children spent a term studying in northern Portugal, where she
was gently chided, but chided anyway, for using the Lisbon dialect.
This is the dialect my children inherited from me and which also
counts as official “standard” in the country. There were
misunderstandings,
and there was, above all, lingering innuendos, from both parties
involved, that the misunderstandings were due to the outsider.

We can further insist that immigrant
communities (choose to) isolate themselves from other communities in
their new country, forgetting that the country’s natives do exactly
the same – in this connection, I must point out the title of a New
Zealand-based academic journal, which I’ve only recently come
across: AlterNative which,
to me, puts talk of natives and nativeness in its right perspective.
And we can say that learners and users of “our” language(s) keep
falling short of (our) expectations concerning conformism to (our)
standards. I have heard many language teachers lament, or empathise,
that their students keep their new language well differentiated from
taught versions of it, for reasons of “fossilisation”, or
“identity”, respectively.

Some
of us may indeed choose to remain in the cosiness of our ghettos, for
reasons akin to self-defence. Loraine K. Obler,
in an article titled ‘Exceptional second language learners’, had
this to say about choices of accent in a new language:

“[...]
one must be willing to
sound like someone from another culture,
but one must be willing to give up the protection that being foreign
confers, since native speakers may make allowances for grammatical
errors when the speaker is obviously not a native speaker and thus
the person is protected from sounding foolish.”

Some
of us may instead choose to sway in and out of ghettos,
according to which image of ourselves we wish to project in time and
place, something that we learn to do as children. Ghada Khattab, in a
book chapter titled ‘Phonetic accommodation in children’s code-switching’,
showed that immigrant children use home-accented speech to heed home
expectations of mainstream language use, and mainstream-accented
speech to establish identity credentials among monolingual users of
the mainstream language.

This ability to accommodate to the
people who are significant to us, which I’ve addressed before and
will come back to some other day,
is of course a human ability, regardless of how many languages are
involved in it. For multilinguals, however, it seems to associate
with an uncanny inability to give simple answers to what some
people take to be simple questions. Like the question in the title of
my next post.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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